Back last November and December, my wife and I flew to Sydney to join a cruise ship (with Celebrity cruises) down the east coast of Australia, across to the South Island of New Zealand and around the southern tip and back up the east coast of NZ to end in Auckland. It was a wedding anniversary trip and really enjoyable (I would truly recommend Celebrity for a cruise like this), but I had questions in my mind about whether the...
I’m going to get back to posting more regularly on my blog – I know I have been a bit slow of late. I’ve been working hard on rewriting my book – now at 3rd Edition, and also working more in my day job which pays better than stock photography! Anyway, back to some information on how sales have been going. Unfortunately, June 2014 was not great – I ended up with just over $2000, with no particularly good results...
I didn’t get around to posting earnings at the end of April. It was an OK month with total earnings of $2203 – a big drop from the $2729 earned in March. The biggest reasons for the drop in earnings was a few sites with large earnings in March not following through in April, and Shutterstock was unfortunately down to less than $1000 again. I plan to do a bigger analysis of earnings per site and will post about that...
My previous post recommended that you remove your images from the Dollar Photo Club because this $1 for any size image for almost any use will destroy the market for single use images on the other sites – that earn us a lot more than the measly $0.29 we will get from this Dollar Club. This is having a marked impact on Fotolia with perhaps 6 million images or more having been removed. To try to counteract the loss of...
I tend to be a photographer who learns by seeing a neat idea, researches how to do it, and then incorporates that technique into my workflow. I’m not good a watching online videos, and have never been on a training course. So, what I am doing spending $695 on a two day creative photography workshop with Bryan Peterson? I saw Bryan speak at last years Nature Visions Expo in Northern Virginia and really enjoyed the day. He is full of...
It is relatively rare for me to get annoyed with the antics of stock agencies, but Fotolia has gone too far, and, like a lot more stock contributors, I have decided to boycott them and remove my images from their library. Why, you may ask! Fotolia was always one of those annoying sites that I stuck with because the earnings – $50 to $80 a month for me – were pretty regular. They were annoying because the upload process required...
A recent reader of my eBook, Getting Started in Stock emailed me recently to ask if it was too late to make a start now with Stock Photography. If you read the microstock forums (and sometimes that is interesting but be aware of a lot of angry and negative people on some of the forums), you will often see references to the good old days in the mid 2000’s when it was easy to get images online and they sold...
We are always looking for something to move our images out of the ordinary to really capture the interest of the buyer (and hopefully the general public) to our stock photo images. Building up expertise in exposure, composition and processing in Lightroom (or Photoshop) helps tremendously, but what tools can give our photographs the edge? I’ve been experimenting with the Singh-Ray Gold-n-Blue polarizing filter which can make some spectacular changes to the scene in front of you – the sort...
I miss being able to present the complex graphs I used to do, but the edict from Shutterstock that you should not provide detailed information on your earnings has put a damper on that for me. I think the line they are taking is not necessary (I’m sure it is to do with analysts trying to estimate their earnings), but they are the ones with the power and I can’t afford to annoy them! Anyway, my Shutterstock earnings are continuing...
Sometimes, on a dark winters night, it is fun to just see what can be created from little bits of photos that are already sitting on your hard drive. Here is one such effort, that I think nicely illustrates the concept of “being adrift” and can be used as a stock image for many leadership (or lack of) illustrations. This could have been a beautifully seen shot with a boat floating on a calm sea, or it could have started...
